Introduction

In Section 2.5. I noted that while representing little more than 2 percent of Indonesia's population, those of Chinese ancestry have been stereotyped as “deviant non-indigenous foreign others” and positioned as scapegoats in times of political and economic turmoil. During such times of turmoil they have been socially identified by masses – despite being largely physically undifferentiable from other Indonesians – and subject to acts of violence against property and person. Drawing on written inter-group communications, group manifestos, speeches, newspapers and interviews, historians have noted that this mass violence often evolved from a combination of local problematic interactions, widely held prejudices, and the actions of groups who benefited from instability (e.g. Coppel, 1983; Purdey, 2006). While eminently useful, such accounts provide narratives that give an appearance of a hypodermic model where representations of signs are received as sent. We know very little about whether, to what extent, and how such signs are “recontextualized” (Bauman & Briggs, 1990) in actual face-to-face interaction.

The next two chapters start to fill this gap by looking at face-to-face interactions that occurred in one urban middle-income space in a period preceded by two occurrences of mass anti-Chinese violence and followed shortly thereafter by the economic meltdown of 1997–1998 (e.g. Purdey, 2006). This meltdown was accompanied by monthly outbreaks of such violence culminating in the well-known lethal mass violence that occurred in Jakarta in mid-May 1998.